Traditional public opinion discovery can be a time consuming and expensive process. To understand how one's brand, company or product is perceived, one would typically pay for polls, interviews, market surveys or focus groups. With the rise of the Internet, customer preferences and marketplace perceptions are discussed globally every day in publicly accessible online resources, such as online newspapers, magazines and forums, newsgroups, Usenet/Google groups, discussion boards and blogs. It's estimated that 10 million new pages are added everyday to the Internet. Thus, newly available machine-readable commentary on particular companies and products (including commentary from professional company analysts) are frequently added to the Web each day.
This publicly available information can be mined for information that may be useful for companies. For example, Intelliseek offers marketing activity monitoring to companies, where consumer generated information on the Web is analyzed to determine the effectiveness of a company's marketing. In addition, Sentiment Monitoring Service (SMS) is a Web analysis tool offered by Accenture, in which human experts provided a list of keywords used to pull information from the Web, where some of the keywords indicated topic relevance, and the remaining keywords indicated either positive or negative sentiments in relation to the topic.